Pay Equality As A Red Herring

The issue of 'pay equality' has surfaced in the news the last few days.  The Obama administration is touting the 'Pay Equality Act' in Congress, while Republicans won't vote for the bill, stating, as Mitt Romney's campaign does, that while they are in favor of gender pay equality in general, they do not support this particular remedy.  As usual, the figure of 77% is thrown out there, which tries to show that women in general make only 77% of what men do across the board in employment.

Frankly, I doubt that 77% figure very much, or rather, that it has any relevance at all these days.  In fact, it seems to me to be a red herring, that ends up distracting us all from the real economic issues facing us these days. 

Let me use as an example my line of work.  If you added up all the pastoral salaries of the women in my Methodist annual conference, you would indeed probably see that the women in general make less in average salary.  But why is that?  Because there are fewer women serving as pastors in churches in general, and because they are not as represented in the biggest churches, where the biggest salaries are paid.  They still tend to be in the smaller churches which pay lower salaries.

Now, is this because there is persistent and pervasive gender discrimination across the board in my Annual Conference?  Well, yes and no.  It is true that there remains in some congregations a reluctance to accept a female pastor.  There are all kinds of reasons for this, including religious ones.  But slowly this is changing, as more women serve as pastors and more congregations experience the gifts and abilities that women bring to ministry.  So slowly but surely the problem of women being accepted as pastors (and therefore getting to the larger churches) is being resolved, and as this is resolved, the 'pay equity' issue is also resolved.  Furthermore, there is no wage discrimination in the conference bureaucracy, where a number of women serve.  So what this shows me is that there is no further legal remedy necessary here, just a continuing evolution in social and religious thinking about the role of women.  Legal remedies as applied to the church would be a disaster, in fact, and perhaps a violation of the separation of church and state.

Likewise with my wife as a teacher.  It would be impossible for most school districts across America to discriminate against women teachers.  My wife makes the same as any man in the system, given their number of years of service and levels of certification.  Now, perhaps my wife doesn't make as a teacher what she should, given the importance of education to society.  But it is what it is, and the Pay Equality Act would not make any difference in this whatsoever.

Likewise with my children in their various lines of work.  There has never been any sense that they are getting paid less or more depending on whether they are male or female.  Likewise with my niece and nephews in the military.  And on and on.  It appears that we have reached the point in America where virtually everyone agrees that there should be no discrimination between men and women when it comes to compensation, and anyone who was prejudice enough to think so would be shunned by the rest of society.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am basically a feminist, in that I believe that women should be treated as the equals of men in every area of life, including marriage, employment, church, military, and so on.  And there certainly was a time back in the 30, 40 and 50 years ago when pay equity was an issue.  But I believe it has been addressed in our society in various laws already placed on the books (and continues to be address in the nooks and crannies of our society where it still exists in some form), and should no longer be a political issue to beat each other over the head.  It's a done deal.

Now, about female health care and birth control, that's a completely different issue....

Obama Vs Romney: The Race Ahead

It certainly feels like the race for President 2012 has taken a definite turn over the last 3 or 4 days.  With the bad unemployment numbers released on Friday, the continuing fears about Europe, and the dismal performance of the stock market, you get the feeling that Romney now has the electoral momentum on his side.

After a long primary season in which Romney kept plugging along like the Little Blue Engine That Could, despite being constantly challenged by new candidates throwing themselves at him like Japanese kamikazes, Romney has emerged victorious and, while slightly scarred, seemingly in good shape.  He's raising money in truckloads, and it's now projected that he'll raise more than Obama for the general election, primarily because of the banks and corporations backing him instead of the President.

He now also seems much more in control of his image than he was in the primaries, and he is using that to good effect.  He is subtly molding his image as the competent manager and leader, the saavy businessman, the faithful husband and devoted father, and the devout and godly Mormon.  And while it is true that the Obama campaign has not yet trained their 'big guns' on him in ads, what they have done has largely fallen flat, such as with the attacks of Bain Capital.

Obama won in 2008 for largely four reasons: (1) he was able to ride a general sense of revulsion with 8 years of Bush/Republican rule;  (2) the economy crashed smack in the middle of the fall campaign, and Obama naturally benefited as the candidate of the party out of power;  (3) McCain picked Sarah Palin as the Veep,  someone whom many in his own party had serious doubts about; and (4) Obama was able to effectively project an aura of hope and change around himself.

None of these four reasons any longer exist.  Obama is now the one in charge, who can be held responsible for whatever gripes people have about the economy (and there are many), and Romney is almost surely going to pick someone as VP who will be seen as competent and acceptable.

In other words, despite the fact that there is a certain edge that comes with incumbency and that Obama is perceived as largely successful in foreign policy, it seems that he will now have an uphill climb to the finish line in November.

Everyone is saying that the three fall debates will play a big role in deciding the election.  What will most likely happen is that neither man will stumble badly in those debates (both Obama and Romney seem to be very capable in the debate format), and therefore other factors already mentioned will play a larger role.

We as Americans are fortunate that both Obama and Romney are smart, well-educated, capable, experienced, moral, and pragmatically moderate politicians.  Although the fringe of the right-wing has tried to portray Obama as an alien and foreigner to America, and while the left-wing will try to paint Romney as the candidate of the 1%, both of these men are responsible and capable Americans.  And so, while I definitely favor President Obama, my guess is that the nation will be in basically good hands with either of them.

It's the paralyzing dysfunction in the Congress, and the neanderthal Supreme Court that worries me more.

Not Everything Should Have A Price

Michael Ignatieff, professor of politics at the University of Toronto, makes an important case in The New Republic for why we should begin to see our society not exclusively as a market for consumers, but as a political community for citizens called a republic, that uses markets when appropriate.  This allows for an appropriate division between private and public goods, something that is becoming increasingly obscured by our new world of wealth and money.

A liberal theory of public goods, backed up by a morally persuasive rationale for progressive taxation, also needs a story about generating growth through public and private investment in the skills and the capabilities of citizens. Without a theory of growth, a politics of virtue runs into the objections that Adam Smith leveled against Rousseau two hundred years ago. Virtue without growth equals stagnation and autarchy. All told, this looks like the minimum program for Sandel’s politics of virtue, but none of it is remotely practical as long as there are no effective limits on money in politics. As long as money is moralized as speech, and not understood as power, there is little chance that the republic can put money in its proper place.

Without a politics—of redistributive taxation, public goods investment for growth, and rules controlling money in politics—any critique of what money has done to American life is just moralizing. We did not drift into this new world of money or arrive here by accident. Powerful interests have carried us here, and it is up to the people acting together to take their republic back. A society is not a market. It is a political community. Restoring the virtue of its citizens demands a politics equal to the challenge of virtue’s enemies.

Some great time-lapse photography of Yosemite National Park!

The Real Lenin

Having just finished a 633 page biography of Lenin by the writer Robert Payne, let me summarize this man's life by quoting from pages 630-632:

Lenin had many sins, but the gravest was a supreme contempt for the human race.  Like Marx he possessed an overwhelming contempt for the peasants....But Lenin went beyond Marx.  Not only the peasants, but all classes of society were anathema to him--except the proletariat [workers], with which he had almost no contact.  He surrounded himself with intellectuals and theoreticians, and he despised them as much as he despised the peasants, for he never found one who was his intellectual equal....

Lenin was the great simplifier, but there are no simple solutions.  He wanted to bring about the ideal state--and there is no doubt about the genuineness of his passion for the ideal state--but the ideal eluded him, as it has eluded everyone else.  Toward the end of his life he realized that after the Russian people had suffered and submitted to intolerable sacrifices under his dictatorship, he had led them along the wrong path.  "I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia," he declared; and those words were his genuine epitaph.  There are few rulers in history who have uttered so clear a mea culpa.

That Stalin should have been his successor was a fearful irony.  That course, brutal and paranoid dictator possessed none of Lenin's intellectual gifts and could scarcely write a sentence which was not a mockery of the Russian language.  Under him Communism became a tyranny of such vast proportions that it exceeded all the tyrannies the world had known up to his time.  Lenin, with his harsh intellect, his egotism, his phenomenal vigor, his always flawed yet ever impressive achievement, remained oddly human; Stalin was a monster.  Yet it is important to observe that there could have been no Stalin without Lenin.  Stalin was Lenin's child; and Lenin, who hated and despised and feared him, must bear sole responsibility for bringing Stalin to power.

Once Lenin had decided that all means were permissible to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat, with himself ruling in the name of the proletariat, he had commited Russia to intolerable deprivations of human freedom.  His power was naked power; his weapon was extermination; his aim the prolongation of his own dictatorship....He could decree the deaths of thousands upon thousands of men, and their deaths were immaterial, because they were only statistics impeding the progress of his theory.  The butchery in the cellars of the Lubyanka [Prison] did not concern him.  He captured the Russian Revolution and then betrayed it, and at that moment he made Stalin inevitable.

The lawlessness of Communist rule was of Lenin's own making.  Ordinary human morality never concerned him; from the beginning he was using words like "extermination" and "merciless" as though they were counters in a game.  Whatever he decreed was law, and whoever opposed his decree was outside the law, and therefore possessing no rights, not even the right to breathe....

The state he brought into being proved to be more unjust and incomparably more tyrannical than the state he overthrew.  He announced that everything would be new, but in fact there was nothing new except the names; for all tyrannies are alike, differing only in their degree of tyranny.  The Cheka was only the tsarist Okhrana under another name:  more unpitying, more terrifying, and effective only when it exterminated opposed groups to the last man.  Under Stalin, the Cheka, more murderous than ever, became the real ruler of the country; and one by one its leaders died in the same manner as the victims.

When the rule of a country is given over to the secret police, then by the very nature of things it loses its humanity, places itself outside the frontiers of civilization, and possesses no history; for the repetition of crimes is not history.  The government which Lenin introduced, believing it to be new, was as old as man, for there is nothing new about tyranny....

Private Equity Industry Upset With Obama

Don Gogel, CEO of a leading private equity firm and moderate Democrat, was interviewed on Charlie Rose over the weekend.  In the course of the interview, Gogel made what I consider to be a strong defense of the private equity industry (which of course includes Romney's Bain Capitol).  Gogel also voted for Obama in 2008, and considers to have been a good President in many ways.  But because of the recent Democratic attacks on the record of Bain Capitol, Gogel is considering voting for Romney.

This is the kind of person whose loss may handicap the President in his effort to be reelected.  I'm not sure that he's totally defected yet, since it is clear that he's uncomfortable with much of the conservativism represented in the Republican Party.  But he will clearly be a bellwether as to whether Obama will succeed or not.

You can watch the interview with Gogel here.

Ps.  Here's another take of private equity from Rolling Stone that isn't quite so positive.

There's only one problem with Romney's story: It doesn’t describe most of what private equity firms actually do. The companies Romney holds up as successes – Staples, Sports Authority et al. – were not Bain private equity deals; they were venture capital investments in companies that Bain neither owned nor ran. All well and good: Venture capital is a good thing – essential for funding the growth of new and developing companies. But Romney didn't make his fortune through venture capital­; he made it through private equity – and private equity, as President Obama pointed out this week, is a very different proposition. "Their priority is to maximize profits," the president said of PE firms, and "that’s not always going to be good for businesses or communities or workers."

Here’s what private equity is really about: A firm like Bain obtains cheap credit and uses it to acquire a company in a "leveraged buyout." "Leverage" refers to the fact that the company being purchased is forced to pay for about 70 percent of its own acquisition, by taking out loans. If this sounds like an odd arrangement, that's because it is. Imagine a homebuyer purchasing a house and making the bank responsible for repaying its own loan, and you start to get the picture.

American Politics as Pro-Wrestling: The Legacy of Andrew Breitbart

I didn't know much about Andrew Breitbart, but after his recent death, I saw how important he was to many on the rabid Right.  And then I read an article this morning about him in Harper's by Thomas Frank.  Frank may be a little harsh and obviously one-sided about Breitbart, but the larger point that is important is the condition of our political debate these days, and how Breitbart seemed to exemplify what is wrong.

He started out as a man who loved to puncture Hollywood vanity, then became a VIP himself.  "Media is everything," he used to say, and by the end it was all he was—a caricature, as he reportedly confided in his final days to Sixties radical Bill Ayers. His articles and books, like the Supreme Court decisions of Clarence Thomas, were secondary and are now largely forgotten. What will be remembered is the ranting collection of pixels he leaves behind, those images of a stout man with graying hair and a snarling lip, saying something mean to someone.

As for Breitbart’s relationship with his one true love, the Internet, I think it is best demonstrated by recalling the way he once quarreled with a Gawker editor via instant message for three days. On and on the mighty champions fought, ultimately generating some 10,000 words between them while trying to hash out whether neo-Nazis could be described as right-wing. Here was an endless Iron Butterfly drum solo of pointless speculation and wandering rage, with no pauses to acknowledge things that are obvious to everyone or to check history books that might have cleared matters up quickly. Just two voices screaming at each other in the ether, their petty insults and accusations preserved for future generations.

For four decades now, the Breitbart model of political confrontation has been around in one form or another. The more I look back over its history, the more I am convinced that its closest evolutionary relative is pro wrestling. There are the same mock-feuds, the same posturing outrage, with the antagonists always avenging their vain selves or the wounded honor of their stage friends. The conflicts mean nothing.  There is nothing at stake. And in the end there is nothing to remember.

Romney: An Unprincipled Man of Wealth?

Elizabeth Drew is one of the more insightful political reporters in Washington, and she's been at it a long time.  In a short piece for the New York Review of Books blog, she writes exactly what I've been thinking about the prospects of Mitt Romney as President. 

The outcome of a presumably close election thus rides on how swing voters ultimately decide what they think about Mitt Romney; their views about Barack Obama are pretty well fixed, even though he remains somewhat opaque to many. The two most interesting questions about Romney are whether he can become a more steady candidate, and what is it that causes him to stumble and say oafish things. The frequency of Romney‘s displays of awkwardness is something rarely seen in a party’s nominee. The nature of Romney’s stumbles—his wife Ann has “a couple of Cadillacs”—is also unusual. The important thing about these slips is that they go beyond being the stuff of jokes and mockery, to raise questions about what kind of president Romney would be.

He just cannot help reminding audiences that he’s very wealthy, and often comes across as simply uncomfortable in dealing with those outside his own narrow world. It’s not just that both he and Ann were raised in plush circumstances—she perhaps even more so, with nannies and horses in the posh Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills—but that neither of them seems to understand how different their lives have been from that of all but a very few. This may explain why even going for the presidency he didn’t bother to pull out funds he’d stashed away in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland or hold off in expanding their home in La Jolla in a $12 million renovation, including an elevator for the four-car garage. The symbolism of such things goes well beyond the “tin ear,” and suggests a paralyzing inability to understand the circumstances of most others: What else can explain Romney’s look of disgust as he disdained the cookies the hostess had placed before him when he met with a middle class group around a picnic table in Bethel, Pennsylvania? ( “I don’t know about those cookies”—which in his narrow-vision he perhaps thought had come from a 7-11.) These stumbles go way beyond George H. W. Bush’s lack of familiarity with grocery store bar codes. How are the voters, and if he were to become president the citizens, going to react to this kind of talk?

In 2004, relating the young married couple’s hardship living a basement apartment while they completed their studies at Brigham Young University, Ann Romney said that if things got too difficult her husband sold some stocks his father had given him. The couple’s apparent sole interest in sports is horseback riding and their one sports passion is dressage horses (which cost an estimated $250,000-$300,000 a year to maintain). Being wealthy doesn’t automatically mean that a politician cannot connect with the middle class or the poor: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy, for example, were at ease about their good fortune, and both could see well beyond their manicured estates.

Romney thinks he is very funny—he and his wife say so—and he laughs a lot at his own jokes, but his jokes tend to be duds, and he lacks wit. He doesn’t get it that telling a group of waitresses that he’s unemployed wasn’t terribly funny. It got less so as it was revealed that he is being paid about $20 million by Bain Capital for doing nothing for the company. Romney is square—and a lot of the people prefer a square, especially if they feel there is something to fear or simply dislike about a more hip and flashy candidate. They might feel safer with a square. Especially one who looks like a Norman Rockwell President.

Romney’s problem is that even if he had compassionate instincts he’s trapped by the fact that he has been running for the nomination in a party that had moved so far to the right that any suggestion that he cares for the plight of others could have endangered his prospects. Thus, in February he told a large and powerful group of conservative Republicans that his record as Governor of Massachusetts was “severely” conservative—ad-libbing the adverb. Romney’s ease in revising the truth goes beyond even the norms of expediency and suggests an unusual absence of core guiding political principles. It also may reflect a discomfiting weakness. A politician in a position of great power without principles and weak is, well, alarming.

Romney in the Driver's Seat

I've just watched Mitt Romney's entire victory speech after last night's primary elections in five states. He gave what looks to be a summary of his entire forthcoming campaign. He definitely should win an award for the number of political cliches you can pack into eleven minutes! But that's what stump speechs are, and that aside it was an impressive presentation both in style and in content.
 
Here are just a few of the phrases he used: "One Nation Under God"; "Saving the Soul of America"; "Return to Founding Principles"; "Land of Opportunity"; "Restore American Greatness"; "We still believe in America as the land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom".

It seems to me that Mitt Romey will be doing his best to resurrect the spirit of Ronald Reagan: a spirit of optimism, hope, and conservative values. And of course in doing so, he will be painting Barack Obama and the Democrats in the worst possible light, even to the point of slanderous misrepresentation (ie. Obama's foreign policy is a 'strategy of appeasement'). But again, that seems to be fair in the game of politics, and he probably will be getting a good dose of it coming at him from the other side!

Will this work? To some extent, it will work, at least to unify the Republican Party and get them on board his campaign. As long as no Republican conservatives are hurling accusations at him, he should be able to make the conservative Party base forget about his flip-flopping or his being the 'Massachusetts Moderate'--see, you've forgotten it already--and unite in their distain and/or hatred for Barack Obama.

The question is where the independents of the nation end up. Once the campaign is in full-swing in the fall, once the heavy guns of the Obama campaign are trained squarely on Mitt Romney, once the two of them meet in their debates, then and only then will we see where those people in the middle end up. Going with the 'devil they know'--President Obama--or taking a chance on the new and fresh face from Massachusetts (or Michigan, or New Hampshire, or California, or Utah, or wherever he's from!).

The other big factor, of course, will be the economy and world events. If the economy sours between now and then--which it easily could, given the volatility of the European economy and dozens of other factors--then Obama is probably toast. If Israel attacks Iran and we're at war, then that could have an effect. And so on. Who would have guessed at this time in 2008, that the economy would have crashed, or that McCain would have picked Sarah Palin? You just never know.

So hang on for the ride...it's going to be a long and bumpy one, I'm afraid!

Back in the Saddle

Okay, I guess it's time to get back to my blog.  I've been away nearly two months now.  I guess I needed a break from it, although that's no excuse because I've been putting things on my Facebook wall that whole time.  But it's just a little easier to do that, it seems, plus it just seems more 'permanent' to post things to 'Rude Awakening' (though it's not really).  And, well, as the pictures shows, I've been doing some other things these nice spring days!

In any case, since I left in late February not too much has happened except that Mitt Romney has put away the Republican nomination.  So that bit of excitement is over, and now it's on to the general election.  Why does this thing take so long?!  It's not good for the country that it does, because not much actual governing gets done in the meantime.

Anyway, I'll be seeing you most days again.  Hope you are well!